Sunday, March 27, 2011

The menu bar has always been a kind of "holy grail" of user interface elements for me. It contains all application commands and allows the user to discover the application capabilies and to learn the keyboard shortcuts. Often used commands are placed into the toolbar for faster access.

I did no scientific research about this, but I think first it was Microsoft with Windows Vista which started to put the menu bar into question for some applications:

The menu bar is hidden per default in the Internet Explorer and the Windows Explorer. To still be able accessing all commands a kind of menu-button has been added to the toolbar.

Until I tried those applications I've been a strong opponent of those "menu bar violations". But after working a while with both approaches it seems that ribbons work very well for applications with a huge number of commands. I'm not sure whether the Internet Explorer or Google Chrome has been the first browser without menu bar, but as user of Chrome since around two years I was surprised that I never missed the menu bar and liked the well-arranged menu button.

I got the impression that the menu button as replacement works well for applications with quite less commands. In the meantime even Firefox 4 has switched to a default setup where no menu bar is shown; so I asked myself whether this might be an option for Dolphin and simply gave it a try. Since the release of Dolphin with 4.5 I try to strive for a cleaner and less cluttered default setup and now with having no menu bar I think the default setup is quite OK [1]:

It gets move obvious when comparing this with the default setup in 4.5:

Before the complaints "I want my menu bar back" start: Of course it is possible to enable the traditional menu bar :-)

Back to the new default setup of Dolphin. Beside the missing menu bar a lot of smaller updates have been done too:

The Information Panel on the right is hidden.

Toolbar items where the icon is sufficient for knowing the command don't have a text. By the way: In 4.7 this can be changed by a simple right-click.

If the Places Panel is shown (like in both screenshots on the left) the "places selector" left from the Home > Pictures > Wallpapers path is hidden as it is duplicated functionality provided by the Places Panel.

The Panels are "locked" per default like in Amarok and don't have a headline and two buttons.

The search bar at the top right has been integrated into the view when executing the "Find" command.

Please note that those points just talk about default settings, no functionality has been taken away. For me it was - and still is - one of the main goals of Dolphin that it is easy and efficient to use without cutting too many features. I somehow like it that despite the added functionality during the last years this is not reflected in additional visual clutter. When looking back at the history of Dolphin screenshots it is somehow funny that for the upcoming 4.7 release Dolphin looks more similar to the old KDE 3 version than the 4.5 version :-)

[1] Please ignore the current look of the zoom-icons in the bottom-right of the screenshot. They will be replaced by a more decent version created by Nuno before 4.7.

Saturday, March 5, 2011

Each time a tooltip is shown in Dolphin or the Information Panel is enabled the metadata of a file must be retrieved:

History

When Dolphin has been written for KDE SC 3 this was straight forward: The class KFileMetaInfo has been used and the metadata was read in the context of the application within a short period of time. The fast retrieving was possible by using the hint KFileMetaInfo::Fastest that assured only up to 64 KByte of the file are read. This limit was sufficient for getting the most important metadata.

With the transition to KDE SC 4.0 KFileMetaInfo internally has been rewritten to use Strigi for getting the metadata. Like Dolphin and other components in KDE SC 4.0 also KFileMetaInfo and some metadata analyzers of Strigi had rough edges:

The KFileMetaInfo::Fastest hint simply has been ignored. Hovering a big video file resulted in reading the whole file. As this reading has been done in the context of the application Dolphin was completely blocked during that period of time.

When implementing the KFileMetaInfo::Fastest hint later it turned out that a few analyzers of Strigi simply decided to ignore this limit.

To bypass a blocking Dolphin I've moved the reading of the metadata into a thread. This worked well until it turned out that some analyzers are not reentrant and yet-another-workaround was required to prevent two threads using a similar analyzer.

Sebastian Trüg (although not responsible for this part of the code) investigated some cool work into KFileMetaInfo and found a way to let all Strigi analyzers respect the 64 KByte limit without changing the analyzers. I was very happy about this until it turned out that some analyzers crash when they get streams ending after 64 KByte...

Current State

The following things work now in KDE SC 4.6:

The quality of a lot of Strigi analyzers has been improved during the last years and most of them work very reliable.

The analyzers work fast by getting only 64 KByte to read.

In comparison to KDE SC 3 the metadata is read in a custom thread which makes the user interface even more responsive.

Still open:

Some analyzers are not reentrant. This is not a big showstopper as reading metadata in parallel is anyhow quite rare so the workaround to serialize the access won't result in a noticable slowdown from a users point of view.

Some analyzers crash (and hence also Dolphin crashes).

From a users point of view it is not important whether Dolphin crashes because of an analyzer or because of an issue in the Dolphin code. Although most of the analyzers are very stable in the meantime it is still a pain for users that e.g. have some Powerpoint-files where the corresponding analyzer simply cannot scope with the 64 KByte limit.

KDE SC 4.7

I understand that writing metadata analyzers can be very tricky, but I was always convinced that not crashing when reading data is not difficult. But no matter whether I'm right or wrong with this assumption: Fact is that more than 3 years after the release of KDE SC 4.0 a few analyzers still crash and seem to be without maintainers that care about this.

Well, with KDE SC 4.7 those crashes will not result in crashing Dolphin anymore. I've moved the reading of the metadata into a custom process. If an analyzer crashes then the worst thing that happens is that no metadata is retrieved. The nice thing is that this also solves crashes for other components that read metadata: E.g. the fileproperties-dialog or overwrite-dialog of kdelibs. In retrospective I should have done this already a lot earlier, but the fact that the old approach worked so well in KDE SC 3 just made me resist to use a dedicated process for this. In the meantime I'm convinced that this approach is the right way in the longterm: It is simply risky if the stability of an application or some kdelibs-dialogs depend from external plugins where the quality of the code varies a lot.

So let's hope this is my last metadata-related post and that this topic is solved finally :-)

Update: Carsten Pfeiffer pointed out that in KDE 3 the KFileMetaInfo::Fastest hint did not restrict the parsing to 64 KByte. Instead it was up to the analyzers itself how they provide metadata that can be calculated cheaply. Too sad that most of the current Strigi analyzers don't support this.